Three Movements
by Delirium Tremens
Summary: Desire and Delirium, and the strange ways in which the Endless relate. Be warned - there is incest later.
1. Strange Little Girls

Rating: PG ... tho' there's implied incest.  
Dedicated to - well, she knows who she is. *G*  
Disclaimer: Of course, these are real beings. But it was Gaiman who found them. Not me.

~~Strange Little Girls~~  
~~Desire Speaks~~

Look at her. Hop, skip and jumping down the street like a child. I suppose, somehow, she is. We've more in common than most would believe.

The others have always wondered, in their infinited lack of compassion disguised as minding their own business, just what it was that made her stop being Delight, what made her take a path outside of Destiny's garden.

What would they say, I wonder, if they knew that her mind didn't snap, with the finality of the guillotine blade on the adulterous aristocrat's neck ... that it was a slow, unravelling? They would be deceived. I know my little sister, almost as well as I know my other, less attractive half.

It was her choice.

She wanted, she told us - Destuction and I - to stop having to think. Thoughts flooded in through her ears and drowned out the simple happiness she had once felt. Everything was changing; a point my noble brother noted so well that he left us all; and she had to change with it, change ... or go under.

And she could see that people were changing too. That more and more were letting their minds go; not rushing into the abyss of Despair's cloudy realm, not choking their way directly to meet our eldest and - though I am loath to say it - most beautiful sister. They were simply disconnecting from the jagged mass of logic that some would have the world be. Destiny would have the world be that way.

I prefer the subtleties. The curves, the indefinite, the unpredictable.

I suppose that's why Delirium and I first drifted together.

Our strangeness, our lack of respect for the rules that bind everything together. She missed Destruction terribly, you see, and for that all the rules were dissolved. What would you say, big brother, if I were to tell you this; she was always afraid of you. Afraid of your rejection, afraid you would talk to her as though she was nothing more than a child; you see, you were the only one of the family to ever assume that child-like meant stupid. And, to tell the truth; 

Yes, it's novel, isn't it, Desire telling the truth? But see, I have my fingers uncrossed. I swear by my heart. By the other side of the sky ... etc, etc ...

I was also always a little afraid of you. Not because of your temper, or your threats of revenge - I knew you could never act upon them - but afraid of your emptiness. Of your absence. Of being ignored and forgotten, of being spurned. And you do. You spurn us, your family, with such terrifying regularity.

Of course, I cannot know what goes on in Del's tousled, fitful head. I suspect she knows more than she lets on. But the distance-with-closeness is refreshing - like Despair and I, but with the mental umbelical cord half-severed, malfunctional. And she's immediate, our sister ... she lives for the moment she is living in.

And I _like_ that.

She's interrogating a man with a dog now. He seems confused by her; not every day a middle-class father is ambushed by a stick-wielding, green-haired teenager; dancing one minute, asking about his dog the next.

Delirium isn't afraid to fall; when she, and thousands who had never even known Delight, let themselves go, they lost nearly all knowledge of what it was like to fall. There is no courage, no cowardice there; just want and "not-want". She is almost a part of me. She Desires. Oh, I'm smiling so much it aches ...

Hah.

I can't say I love her. I am, after all, not of that world. Desire does not love. But I _want_ her. And I _need_ her. I desire her ... my dear, deranged little sister, my strange little girl. She is something quite other to the rest of the Family, and unlike you, Dream ... I would never waste my precious time on mortals. They are toys; whatever you said to me.

She's skipping now.

My Delirium.


	2. Me Without You

Rating: R  
Warning: Weird sex is involved, as is incest. Warned.  
Disclaimer: All the little twiddly living things contained in this fic are, of course, the mindmeats of his Gaimanness  
Dedication: Mrrrr . . . for my seahorse.

~~Me Without You~~  
~~Delirium speaks~~

Beginnings don't really make much sense.

Everything doesn't have to start somewhere; that's a lie. It's a Dream-thought. Whatever the story, you always come in after it has started, and you leave before it's finished. Even us. Especially us.

Maybe there was never a time when it wasn't this way.

My eyes might be shut or maybe it's just too dark to see but I can feel breath across my face and it's as tangiable and as real as a hand, then it is a hand pulled like a whip across my aching mouth, a suffocating rag or an eveloping jelly ... jelly ... children's parties, the clowns dancing and the balloons tethered to the ground.

"Del, shush. It's _me_."

Like some sort of mist. There are two of him/her. One travels up the outside of my body like a silk scarf that covers my whole skin, filling the naked expanses and the nooks and the crannies and moulding itself around my every angle. Hot and cold. The other is inside me ... starting in my lips, and my other lips ... and spreading outwards and upwards and inwards, a chemical, a feeling, another entity. In the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they burned witches for being possessed by the Devil. I know, I was there burning too.

It's not Lucifer inside me, though s/he claims to know Morningstar as intimately as Morpheous does

. Orchids.

Like a strange tide, all out of synch with the phases of the moon. Desire's outside me and inside me, against me and with me, and I can feel myself slowly dripping apart at the joints, my skin turning to liquid and my bones into dust and they beat through my heart with a thousand wings. I can't tell where s/he ends and I begin. Beginnings never make any sense, ends less so.

"Del, shush. It's_ me_."

With a whisk and whisper of feathers brushing against my breasts (tonight we both have them, tomorrow only Desire will, perhaps). Shaking comes running up my bones, s/he withdraws from my veins and settles inside my stomach, outside my lips, twisting like a foetus. Writhing in amniotics.

"Del, shush ... it's _us_."

Lizards running along the floor.

Quivering increases and I know I am going to loose control. Desire doesn't care if I stay together.

S/he breaks apart within me ... trickles out of my vagina, swirls skipping smokelike across the floor, a wraith in the moonlight. The sunlight; "if you prefer the day, Del". Clouds drift across the ceiling; scattergraphs trace themselves on the wall.

Reverse polarity.

I am in pieces. They hover and twist into shapes while s/he stands at the foot of the bed - rug - tent - bath - as solid and undeniable as the ground (the ground is merely a collection of equations woven together by chance, hope and a shared interest in not being vapour) and the music gets faster and faster andfaster andfasterand fasterandfasterandfaster ...

"Pull yourself together ...

"All round the world, Del ... they are us. Every single mindless fuck and loving embrace and breathless desperate fumble, every rape, every look of longing, every pure passion and twisted, depraved exhaltion ... all of them are us, little sister."

Love is born, s/he says. Love is born of Desire and Delirium.

Cradle to grave, chalk on my fingertips. Consumed.

Endings never make much sense either.


	3. The Butterfly Effect

Rating: PG  
Disclaimer: See Mr. Gaiman (otherwise known as God). See The Endless. They belong to Mr. Gaiman, aka God. See Del. See Del _borrowing_ The Endless. See that Del has no fucking money because she works in a wig shop, and therefore it is pointless to sue her. Don't sue her.  
Dedication: To the real Desire, from her smile.

~~The Butterfly Effect~~  
~~Outside~~

Their wings beat helplessly against the inside of a hand. It is an attractive prison; the feel of skin against their wing tips is like the softest suede against a baby's peach-like cheek. Suede is made from the hide of unborn calves; and the comparison is not unintentional. There is cruelty, in those hands, and they beat their wings more frantically in an effort to escape.

"Yours are bigger. They're pretty."

A moment's consideration, and they're released. Relieved to be free, they beat their delicate wings and shoot upwards, aiming for the sun and for salvation. They spiral upwards together in a glowing translucent mist of snow-white, chattering among themselves.

"Yes ... but you make colours better."

A second cloud appears from nowhere; blots of purples, reds, blues, greens, golds, ivory, ebony, jade and pearl twist in and out of each others paths on wings made of little but air. They are as transient as soap bubbles, as graceful and as purposeless. They are watched by two pairs of eyes as they follow, in a much more haphazard and confusing fashion, the route of the previous cloud of wings.

"Colours taste funny."

"Some of them do."

Silence as this exchange is considered with the deepest of cognition. "Have you ever tried to make blue dining table pancakes?"

"Can't say I have, lover, can't say I have."

"Oh. They don't work very well - the dining tables get stuck to the ceiling and then all the blue runs out of the pancake and if you don't concentrate for very long the ceiling turns into a frog and eats it all."

Another silence, a warm one with the suggestion of fingertips brushing together in that ancient and most chaste of kisses. The white cloud has disappeared from sight; whether it has actually succeeded in reaching the sun and therefore obliterating its own existance remains to be seen.

"I suspect that's a problem only you have, dearest."

"Mmm."

This silence is as long as sunset, as warm as midsummer's eve by a piled bonfire; midsummer's eve without the sacrifice and the screaming; the tamer, sweeter midsummer's eve with spiced wine and middle-aged, middle-class women singing songs that were written by an Aborigini sage. He wrote them from his home in San Francisco, giggling and taking sips from a bottle of Jim Beam, convinced that Westerners were indeed crazy and would buy just about anything if you could stick a label on it. Guilt? Maybe.

Back in the unplace that feels like summer grass coiling softly over two pairs of bare and happy feet, the second cloud has reached its zenith and vanishes into the deepening blue of the sky. Night is drawing in, but the cloud-free air retains a clearness which few places can show any longer. The larger pair of feet brushes against the smaller, strokes the arch of them with dexterous toes that have all the skill and agility of their owner's fingers. There is, predictibly, a very contented sigh.

"Del."

"Mmm?"

"One of your butterflies has got caught in my hair." There is a rustle, and something small and struggling is removed from immaculate thick black hair. The only way something could get caught in that forest is on purpose; it begs to have fingers run through it, lips pressed against it words muttered into it in the low, dreamy tones of infatuation. It deserves to be inhaled for a scent like hemp, like lavender, like musk, like every fragrance that ever made anyone dizzy with lust.

Between smooth thumb and forefinger, topped with gilded nails, a classic Hallmark Valentine's heart is twisting and swearing, kicking its arms and legs viciously and trying to bite the polished perfection of its captor with teeth it doesn't have.

"Hearts, Del? A bit twee, isn't it?"

"That wasn't me. That was you."

The heart is not a heart. It is a feather, five inches long and dazzlingly white; as pale and unnaturally glowing as a bad special effect. At first it is stiff and strong; a pinion from the wing of some large bird, perhaps a swan, perhaps something ... other. But as it descends it ripples slowly into something more wispy; an ostrich tail-feather; etherally soft, demonically ticklish.

It is rubbed without warning on the sole of a bare foot (whose toenails were blue a second ago, but are now plain again, sparkling slightly) and a gale of indignant giggling stirs the air. Words form in the breeze and are discorpriated almost immediately. The feather stops, raises, and five feet three inches higher is tapped with tenderness against still-smiling lips.

"I think I will call them Flutterby-utterly-flibbits," announces the smiler, her hair catching the last of the light in a net made of tangled gold, emerald and ruby. It is the kind of hair mothers despair over and grandmothers run from, and when she speaks a dog's squeaking chew toy floats into the void and runs yapping around the forming stars. "Desire? What will you call yours? They've gone but what will you call them when they come back?"

"Angels, my precious. And who says they will come back?"


End file.
